


in the burning theater i am blessed

by tiltingheartand



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, also as a warning hilbert is not actually alive for any of this, complicated feelings for people who are no longer alive, post-canon but pre-earth, rated T for a T-rated dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24934054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiltingheartand/pseuds/tiltingheartand
Summary: They all tell you, over and over again, that dreams are … meaningless, is what the general consensus seems to be.Well. Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel/Alexander Hilbert
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	in the burning theater i am blessed

**Author's Note:**

> look. this vomited itself out of me in an hour when i should've been working. i don't know.
> 
> title is from "the projectionist" by thoushaltnot.

So here’s the thing:

They all tell you, over and over again, that dreams are … meaningless, is what the general consensus seems to be. Random nonsense. The visual equivalent of defragging a hard drive.

It seems like there’s not a lot of actual factual _science_ about them, which isn’t at all helpful, especially since you’re starting to get the feeling that your fellow crew members — castaways? are you castaways at this point? maybe mutineers? or, god help you, given the way Minkowski and Lovelace interact with you, maybe at this point they’re just your family, like it or not — are getting really, really tired of answering what amounts to the same set of questions, over and over and over again. You try to put yourself in their shoes, and yeah. Fair. 

“Hey Hera?”

“Yes, Officer Eiffel? Doug?” Beat. “Sorry.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” you say, because everyone else has been doing the same thing, and you can’t really blame her for it any more than you can blame them. Force of habit, and all. You can’t imagine how hard that must be if your brain is actually a computer.

And then, abruptly, you realize your desire to ask has abandoned you entirely. You don’t want to ask, you don’t want to explain _why_ you’re asking, you don’t want to deal with any of it. 

“Doug?” Hera says, after you’ve been silent for what she must judge to be a little too long.

You shake your head, and sigh, and shake your head again for good measure. “Never mind, Hera,” you say, trying not to sound as miserable as you feel. “Sorry, baby.”

“... don’t worry about it,” she says, and you put your face in your hands. The endearment just slips out, somehow, when you’re paying attention to other things. Only with Hera. Sometimes when it’s just the two of you, sometimes when it’s not. Nobody ever says anything about it, but the looks on their faces tell you it must have meant something to Hera, when it was Officer Eiffel saying it. It’s probably excruciating to hear it in your voice without anything there to back it up.

“Sorry,” you say, again, softly, and if she hears she doesn’t respond.

  
  
  
  
  


The thing is:

Plenty of the dreams you have are just the random nonsense dreams you’re told about. There’s a _lot_ of random nonsense. It’s really goddamn weird, honestly, but you understand the idea.

But then: well. You dream, once, of a man muttering above you in Russian, probably to himself, as you sweat and pant and struggle against the straps pinning you to the bed.

You dream, once, of stripping down because there’s a screwdriver missing, and the other man in the room with you does the same, and _neither_ of you have the screwdriver and now you’re both naked _and_ you’re sneezing, and Minkowski wants to know why either of you are naked in the first place.

You dream, once, of an explosion, and of your already-broken heart shattering into a few more pieces.

There’s a different feeling to some of them, you think. There’s a — a crispness to them, maybe, to the dreams that you wake up and think, _that was a memory_. 

(You wouldn’t believe the screwdriver one, but you ask Minkowski, and her face does something very complicated and very quick, and then she laughs a tiny bit and starts telling you about the Blessed Eternal.)

There are other ones, too. You keep dreaming about a woman who’s probably about your age, and sometimes you’re happy together and sometimes you hate each other but you can always feel this tug, somewhere in your chest, that marks her as yours, marks you as hers. And sometimes there’s a little girl, almost a clone of her mother except for her eyes and her nose, mirror images of your own, and you love her so much you can hardly breathe. You think, when you wake from these ones, that there’s probably going to be a lot of things to deal with when you get home. 

But those all happen on Earth. The ones with the man are all in space, all on the _Hephaestus_ , and you think: one more person who died out here. You think: I wonder if we meant anything to each other.

  
  
  
  
  


Because the thing is, the thing is:

You’re always so confused when you wake. What you remember most is his voice, deep and gravelly and accented and usually annoyed. What you remember most is his hands, somehow always so gentle and careful when he touches you. What you remember most is the virus he shoved into your blood, no questions no answers no time to think.

You’re not sure what your relationship was with him, at this point you’re barely sure you _want_ to know, because sometimes you wake up seething with rage and sometimes you wake up feeling hollow, like somebody’d scooped your insides out and then walked away.

Once you wake from a dream of hands and lips and skin, touching and caressing and kissing, soft mutterings in your ear in a constant stream of Russian you still don’t understand but like to think are positive, and you think: huh. But it didn’t have that feeling memories normally have, not completely, and you realize the truth abruptly. A memory of a dream. 

You know people can have complicated relationships, obviously that’s a thing, but you hadn’t realized any of yours had been quite _that_ complicated. 

Two days later, you dream of a moment, the two of you looking at each other in silence, floating so close. The air feels supercharged around you. You think _maybe, maybe_ , and you reach out to grasp his hand in yours, twine your fingers together, and then the comm buzzer sounds and the moment’s broken.

That one, you think, that one did happen. You’re sure of it.

  
  
  
  
  


How do you get over someone when he’s dead and you’re watching your interactions in instant replay, stuck in a never-ending loop of things you wish you’d done and things you wish you hadn’t done and things you wish he’d done?

The thing is: honestly, you’re not sure.

**Author's Note:**

> i also live [on tumblr](http://tiltingheartand.tumblr.com). although, fair warning, i don't really post about wolf 359.


End file.
